Research Database
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
Tamm Review: Reforestation for resilience in dry western U.S. forests
Year: 2019
The increasing frequency and severity of fire and drought events have negatively impacted the capacity and success of reforestation efforts in many dry, western U.S. forests. Challenges to reforestation include the cost and safety concerns of replanting large areas of standing dead trees, and high seedling and sapling mortality rates due to water stress, competing vegetation, and repeat fires that burn young plantations. Standard reforestation practices have emphasized establishing dense conifer cover with gridded planting, sometimes called 'pines in lines', followed by shrub control and pre-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire deficits have increased drought‐sensitivity in dry conifer forests; fire frequency and tree‐ring carbon isotope evidence from Central Oregon
Year: 2019
A century of fire suppression across the Western US has led to more crowded forests and increased competition for resources. Studies of forest thinning or stand conditions after mortality events have provided indirect evidence for how competition can promote drought stress and predispose forests to severe fire and/or bark beetle outbreaks. Here we demonstrate linkages between fire deficits and increasing drought stress through analyses of annually resolved tree‐ring growth, fire scars, and carbon isotope discrimination (Δ13C) across a dry mixed‐conifer forest landscape. Fire deficits across…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fine scale assessment of cross boundary wildfire events in the Western US
Year: 2019
We report a fine scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events for the western US. We used simulation modeling to quantify the extent of fire exchange among major federal, state, and private land tenures and mapped locations where fire ignitions can potentially affect populated places. We examined how parcel size effects the wildfire transmission and partitioned the relative amounts of transmitted fire between human and natural ignitions. We estimated that almost 90 % of the total predicted wildfire activity as measured by area burned originates from four land tenures (Forest Service,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Policy tools to address scale mismatches: insights from U.S. forest governance
Year: 2019
Recent literature has highlighted the growing array of scale mismatches in environmental governance and offered policy design principles for improved governance approaches. A next step is to develop our understanding of specific policy tools that can address scale mismatches. This paper reviews the range and importance of scale-related challenges and solutions in environmental governance, situating this discussion in the context of forest governance. We then tackle the matter of policy tools to address scale mismatches, by synthesizing findings from recent policy research on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article